


The Curse-Dealer's Room

by thaumaturge



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Black Mage - Freeform, Gen, The Void
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-18 00:50:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1408861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thaumaturge/pseuds/thaumaturge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The (in)famous black mage C'rrahsa Yamah has been staying at the Quicksand free of charge for months now. Her celebrity status is good for business, but what with the rumours and all, nobody wants to clean her room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Curse-Dealer's Room

Q'waderi looked at the work schedule on the chalkboard and jumped a little, her stub of a tail flicking upwards. _Startled_ , she assigned to the feeling; she was merely startled, not afraid of what she was marked down for. Certainly in a moment she would be perfectly calm because nothing bad would happen. This room assignment wasn't bad; it was merely unusual, of course.

Ever since that infamous thaumaturge began staying at the Quicksand, it had always been her co-worker Tatani whose job it was to clean her room. And when it wasn't Tatani's, it was Hubert's. Surely one of them must be at work today. Therefore, this arrangement was irregular, and it was normal to be startled at a sudden change. That was the entire source of the feeling, and the prickling of fur standing on end all over her arms, up the back of her neck to her ears, was a delayed reaction to her startlement. It would naturally take her some time to calm down. That, too, meant nothing at all. 

She rubbed her arms and flipped up the hinged counter that separated the employees' room from the hallway, thinking she'd better go ask Momodi what changes were in the air today. Planning and anticipating, that was the secret to success!

Q'waderi leaned over the front desk, which was quiet at this midmorning hour. "Hey, Momodi?" she said, disliking the tension in her own voice, which might make someone think she was afraid rather than calming down from a sudden jump. "I was just wondering what's up with the schedule today. Doesn't Hubert normally clean Miss Yamah's room when Tatani is off?"

The redheaded Lalafell set down her steaming mug. "Tatani's wife is having her baby," she said as if that had been the question, "and I'd be a mean employer not to let her go and watch the birth. She probably won't be in for a week or so, but there's going to be a little party when she gets back to work." Momodi winked. "Dodoriyo is keeping head count, so let him know if you want in."

"Yeah, I heard," said Q'waderi, who had already pitched in her money and helped the organizer decide half the details. "But isn't Hubert in today, or something?"

"Hubert's down with a nasty cough. I don't want our guests leaving here coughing because of him, so I told him last night not to come in if he couldn't keep his sickness to himself."

Knowing Momodi, she'd probably told Hubert to stay home for his own sake, even if she wanted to pass it off as a business practice. Momodi was a combination of strict and kind that sometimes left her newer employees scratching their heads. Letting Hubert rest made sense, but that put the schedule in a strange arrangement. "Do you need me to spend this morning doing the chamber pots, then?" Q'waderi offered, sacrificing herself to a stretch of emptying offal jars that always felt longer than it was.

"That's nice of you, but Edine's already got them. Why, Deri, is there a reason you're that generous? And Edine too. What are you girls up to?" Momodi put her hands on her hips in her classic pose that showed she was about to launch into one of her lectures about secret-keeping, pranks, or perhaps the reason she never gave advances on pay.

"No no no, no! I was just trying to help cause you're shorthanded. And I value my job." That hung between them for a moment, both knowing how regular and fair her work at the Quicksand was, especially compared to the positions available at some of the other taverns in town. And her stubby tail and unattractive face wouldn't make her the most popular barmaid or salesperson, either. "You know. Brownie points." She clasped her hands and smiled in a friendly gesture, which was always obvious, but sometimes it worked anyway because everyone liked a happy smile.

"Well then, I suggest you get down to the schedule. What I put you down for's what I want you doing," declared Momodi, final and efficient.

"Oh-kay, oh-kay," the miqo'te agreed, managing a lighthearted tone as she backed off. She'd almost started feeling better about the peculiarity. But surely it might be for the best if she asked to switch with someone. Just in case everyone preferred it the other way around. She might as well offer, right? 

In an open room, Edine was leaning over a window emptying something that smelled heavy with the corrupted refuse of what must have been foreign spices into the narrow alley below. Q'waderi refrained from pinching her nose so that she could more convincingly offer, "Edine, do you want to switch jobs with me this morning?" 

The Hyuran maid carried the empty chamber pot back to the corner, dragging it around the folding screen, and set it down with a loud thunk. "Not on your life. You have to clean that creepy-ass thaumaturge's room today."

"Ah..." said Q'waderi, at a loss to mitigate the blunt refusal. "I guess not, then. Just thought I'd check."

Edine snorted as she came back around the corner. "I bet there are things in there worse than chamber pots. I bet she's got dead bats' wings. Or jars full of eyeballs. I bet she snacks on them at night while reading her creepster tomes."

Q'waderi's ears flicked back at the statement; it was unthinkingly Hyuran, hinting that eyeballs didn't make a good snack. The guest in question was miqo'te, after all. But Edine's real point was that there could be some awful things in that room. It could be teeming with horrors that that normal people would never imagine to begin with. And Edine's folded arms and firm expression made it clear that she wasn't going to deal with it. "Yeah, probably," Q'waderi agreed.

"So no. Good luck with that. I'm just gonna enjoy not drawing the short straw."

Q'waderi nodded, her mouth set in a compressed line, and huffed a sigh out her nose as she left the room. For a long moment, she stood there in the hallway, trying to think of another alternative. Nobody else had a particularly unpleasant task that morning. It wasn't deep-cleaning day. If Edine had resorted to chamber pot duty to avoid C'rrahsa Yamah's room, probably no one with lighter work had an incentive to switch. 

Her attempts to avoid it had come to a dead end. She might as well get to work and get it over with.

Tatani had told her about the room before. Nothing visibly bad, she'd said, with a heavy emphasis on the word "visibly". It was a medium room, carelessly kept by the celebrity who stayed there free of charge. The lucky woman even received free cream cheese desserts from Momodi on occasion, or she had until she started buying them every day. There was no disputing that her presence brought business to the inn as well as the guild, but the mounting cost of what the Quicksand handwaved away for her was enormous. That cat received the royal treatment just for being good at what she did. Q'waderi was good at what she did too, but she wasn't brimming with accolades and the generosity of everyone she met. Even her friend who worked in the markets had said Q'waderi was lucky that she might run into the famous C'rrahsa Yamah at her job. Lucky? Q'waderi skittered away every time she saw the thaumaturge. Unexpectedly tiny, but with an almost sniffable air of pitch blackness, she was shrouded in dark clothes that only revealed her long tail and her watchful eye. Q'waderi had never had a good look at her face, not that she'd wanted to get one, but Tatani said she had a bright gaze that transfixed you. Just like you'd expect of a curse-dealer. And then there were _the rumours_. 

Everyone at the Quicksand knew that woman was a dangerous witch, that she vaporized people, when she didn't slit them open and cauterize them shut after taking necessary parts as sacrifices for her voidsent summoning, when she didn't steal or shatter their minds to begin with. She controlled a vast army of thralls who might as well have been tempered, or perhaps were. She made them dance until they bled. She measured their screams with a stopwatch. She took the aether out of their body and put it in crystals. If you go near her, you'll wake up in a different body; or else you will never wake up, but someone else will wake in your body. Some people even said that if you whisper her name while looking at your reflection in a stream, she will grab you and pull you in and drown you. That one at least was probably an exaggeration, but some of them had to be true. How could anyone think she was lucky, having to work to please a sorceress like that?

Q'waderi stood at the door to the thaumaturge's room, rag-wrapped mop in hand, water bucket at her side. She vowed to do a thorough job of this cleaning, so that C'rrahsa Yamah would be pleased, so that she would never be angry with Q'waderi, and so that she'd praise her cleaning to the boss. Tatani was a good worker and a perfectionist, which gave her a lot to live up to. Well, it had to be now rather than never. Reminding herself how much she valued her job, she unlocked the room, mildly surprised when the doorknob didn't zap her to death, and eased open the door.

As Tatani had said, the room didn't look too bad at first glance. At least the curtains were drawn open, letting in the glow of the indirect sunlight. Something smelled wrong, like stale prey, but nothing the dirty plates on the table didn't explain. As her eyes adjusted to the amount of light in the room, she saw clutter everywhere. Most of it was expensive, she noted as she stepped further inside. Several staves leaned against one corner, bone and gold and strange black metals, set with stones and horned carvings and sculptures. A dresser top showcased a jewelry box, atop which was laid a tangle of chains and earrings of various designs. Flanking it were corked jars of what might even be as ordinary as perfume-- and might not. And sitting lightly in the shallow grooves of the lace table runner, several large, clear orbs of materia had been boldly left out to shine in the sun. What kind of materia would a thaumaturge want? Q'waderi shuddered. The standard mirror, like those mounted behind the dresser in every room, was covered with a velveteen cloth embroidered with a design that made her dizzy to look at. It was a simple figure, but when she tried to look at it, it oscillated like a living thing and altered its form upon the still cloth. Perhaps what was underneath it wasn't a mirror at all; she wasn't about to look.

A long table stood on the other side of the room, watched over by the symbol of Nald'thal drawn in what smelled like blood on the wall. She thought of how Momodi would have a fit if it stained, and what a _pleasant_ thing to draw. At least it was recognizable to anyone, which was more than could be said for most of the contents of the table. There could be a simple purpose for the partly-burnt candles, their ornate sticks half-coated with generations of wax drips. But the dusty tablecloth, thick with sweet-smelling ashes, was also host to a careful arrangement of objects: little clay statues, and crystals that glowed with innate rainbow light. A scrap of paper inked with a riot of lines and smeared with spoken blood. An array of coloured gems arranged in a circle. A lock of orchid-colored hair, burnt at one end. A sharp little knife stained unevenly black. A detailed marble angel impaled on a spear, its expression frozen in strange ecstasy. A grotesque baritine crocodile figure covered in bits of real fur. Sparkling gems glued in a cluster, sprouting wire feet and stalks, formed a coblyn sculpture no bigger than a chestnut, its boggling eyes pointing in opposite directions. It was this last detail that made Q'waderi back away. Too much, it was too strange. What a twisted mind must have arranged these bizarre figures lovingly on a table like art.

It was past time to get down to business, make this insane wizard happy and get the hells out of here. She snatched up the plates on the table, which smelled at least like a normal supper, and stacked them outside the door. Dragged in the pail, dipped her rag and began rubbing at the windows. Focus on the job, she told herself. Dirty windows wouldn't be enchanted. Would they? Something rippled in her field of view. She jumped back, fur prickling on end, in her haste almost knocking over several different jars of ink on top of a stack of books on the end table. That was the real problem with this room. Not only was it madly cluttered with incomprehensible things of unknown use and origin, but one never knew what was normal and what was-- was-- _cursed_. 

The strange smell hadn't dissipated; in fact it was worse on the windowed side of the room. She moved experimentally away from the wall, then back towards it. Now that she'd removed the plates, it smelled less like food and more like creatures. Perhaps even a plant; it was no scent she knew. She checked every horizontal surface she could find for expired food, determined to make the room clean and nice. If the source of the smell turned out to be some freaky magical experiment, she'd leave it alone, but she didn't want to leave some gross food trash in here. Besides, Tatani had never talked about weird smells in the room, although lalafell noses were next to useless. Either way, no miqo'te maid worth her shells was going to leave this room smelling wrong without at least checking whether it needed to be cleaned up. 

She draped her rag on the side of the bucket and stepped away from the mildly soapy water to clear her nose. Sniffing methodically, she circled along the walls to determine the source. Perhaps-- no, definitely-- it was coming from the large armoire in the corner. 

Now that was troubling in an ordinary way. Her concern for guest privacy battled with her pride in cleanliness, a refreshingly normal problem that could have been a relief, were it not layered under the fear of what might be inside. Should she open the armoire? She'd opened private places to check for problems before; if she didn't touch the contents, nobody would ever know, and she could eliminate the source of the odor as a concern. More importantly, she could get it over with and get out of this insane room. Spurred on by impatience, she raised the metal latch on its hinge and pulled open the door.

A vortex of nothingness met her, and reality slanted sideways. 

She struggled against dizziness to back up, clumsily scooting away from the place that was not a place, but it pursued her without moving. Her mind spun as she sought some claw-hold on its nature, desperate to anchor it to something she could understand as real and right-side-out. She willed it to stop contradicting itself before her, to be something that belonged in this world, as if she were dreaming; but it was as true as she was, and it beat into her senses repeatedly with uncontrolled strength. A wave of nausea hit her, and she shut her eyes tight against the flipping and turning of existence, the rapid disorienting shift of presence and non-presence. Yet whether she looked or not, it loomed in her perception, forcing its image into what must be the place called her aetheric self. It only pulsed all the harder when she tried to cover her ears to block out the throbbing and hold her breath against the ever-changing alien smells, the stifling of her mundane senses bringing the aether into sharper contrast.

Trying to steady herself by catching concrete objects in her senses, she stared at a single spot and fought to understand what she saw, because if she could understand then it wouldn't, couldn't, be an infinite hole of nothingness with entire universes teeming out of it. Arcs of coloured confusion raced along the edges and pulled away her gaze for long moments, flashing with the broken fibres of reality, as if their rioting denseness could make up for the absolute lack that was the center. The Void. She didn't have to think about what little she'd heard of it to know what was roiling before her. And beyond, yet also within, the nothingness was many somethings, dazzling her sense of what could be co-located in one place. She felt like she was scrambling without even moving her body, buffeted between waves of aetheric pressure that confused her mundane perception, grabbing for the moment in between.

What was actually inside the armoire, now behind the Void, now in front of it, was a pile of some folded thing. She crawled closer-- keeping her distance didn't help; it didn't change the truth of what was there-- and pulled it out of the armoire, desperate to prove it was a real object. 

It was a bundle of black leather clothing. A mage's robe, pants, gloves, even a hat laid neatly on top. She reached in again and pulled out the shoes. Behind, in the armoire, the Void was still there, horribly gaping like a rip in the laws of nature, but at least it was not simultaneously Void and an object. Five objects. She laid them on the floor and looked at them.

And then it got worse. She yanked her hand away in horror. Because the clothing itself _looked like_ the Void. Something started to fray and pull apart, indistinct, no part of the physical world but rather of its nature, so slight that she would not have seen it if she hadn't been staring at its huge companion a moment ago. 

Something was pulling her. Hands pulled her by her apron ties, and she slid, unresisting, lacking even the perspective to know which direction she was going. A door closed in front of her, and someone was shaking her, causing her head to ache. Slowly, her vision began to clear.

"Stop, stop," she mumbled. The shaking stopped, and her sense of direction finally started to roll into proper place. 

Edine's voice answered. "Sorry. Are you okay? I had to drag you out of there with that _thing_."

"What thing?" said Q'waderi stupidly, who remembered very well what thing. If it could be called a thing. "I mean, no. It was more like an experience."

"Whatever! I'm just glad you're safe."

Q'waderi was genuinely touched at her co-worker's concern. "Thank you." She swiveled around to face the hyur. "I shouldn't have opened the armoire, but something smelled crazy, and I had to find the source."

"You definitely shouldn't have stared at it," said Edine. "I went in to look for you, and you were just sitting there watching it like it was a play."

"I knew I shouldn't," said Q'waderi, a strange feeling rising within her that what she was saying wasn't entirely accurate, but she'd deal with that later. "I just kept thinking I could make sense of it, but I couldn't." 

Edine stood up and straightened her skirt. "Well. Cleaning or no cleaning, we are done with this room. It's almost the end of your shift anyway."

"I was in there that long?" She had thought it was only a few minutes, but she had felt herself lose control of time along with everything else. "Scratch that. I'm sure I was. It just didn't feel like it."

Q'waderi half-crawled, half-rolled into a position with her back against the wall and closed her eyes. She probably needed rest, but even more, she needed to sort her thoughts. Edine said something about the employees' room and left, which let her fall into a daze.

She was still trying to shake off the remnants of the experience when a new voice said something that might have been addressed to her. The sound was sharply real. Q'waderi opened her eyes and stared up into the bright odd-eyed gaze of a thaumaturge.

"Are you okay?" the strange miqo'te repeated.

Q'waderi squeaked and climbed to her feet as fast as she could when she recognized the dark green tail. "Miss Yamah! I'm so sorry! I haven't finished cleaning your room, but..." She was about to offer to finish the job before her exhausted mind caught up to the problem. "I can't go back in there, because there's... a problem."

"Prrt?" C'rrahsa Yamah-- it was hard to think of her by anything other than her full famous name, even with her standing right there being an ordinary person-- opened the door, leaned her head inside, and then to Q'waderi's relief, she retreated and closed the door again. "Ah. I see."

"I'm very sorry. I thought something smelled weird, but I must have been wrong, but I just wanted to clean it up for you," Q'waderi babbled. There were far too many problems mounting up, beginning with the fact that she'd opened the armoire. She could get fired or turned into a sandwich for that. She wasn't sure which she should be more worried about.

"There must have been a voidsent. I'd forgotten that if they stay in one spot for too long, the fissure those voidsent-leather garments open can get wide enough to let all kinds of creatures in. Much wider, actually. Oops." She laughed.

"And you wear them?" screeched Q'waderi in horror, forgetting her position momentarily, because she remembered seeing exactly that, and because it wasn't funny.

C'rrahsa Yamah wrapped her arms around herself, smiling dreamily. "It's so cozy. I feel so close to the voidsent."

"Right... I'm glad for you." Q'waderi didn't even know how to respond to the nutcase who had sailed past the threshhold of sanity so fast she was a blur.

"So, do you feel any different?"

"What?"

"Do you feel any different after looking at the fissure?"

"I don't-- what kind of-- why?" replied Q'waderi while she tried to figure out the answer to what she'd been asked. "Different how?"

"In any way that moves you to describe it as such." The infamous adventurer opened her satchel and thumbed through some papers and thin books with soft leather covers. She pulled out one of these and started picking through the pages. "For the sake of comparison."

It was obvious, wasn't it? Q'waderi felt confused and tired. She hadn't changed; she'd merely been trapped in some kind of nausea-inducing aetherically pressuring carnival ride. The way she'd felt beforehand was that her mind had been clearer. Just thinking about that clicked something into place, and she was able to separate the memory of the confusion from her current and former state.

Ah. She _had_ changed. The inaccuracy from earlier opened wider. She'd said to Edine that she shouldn't have stared. And certainly it had been an unpleasant experience, from which she was still feeling sick. But there was also a better feeling inside her now than there had been, warm and pleasant, like a flower opening inside her. 

"I do feel different," she admitted. "I wouldn't want to look at it again, but I feel like I know more of something important now. I can't say what it is, though." A wider understanding, a fuller grasp of the process of living that she hadn't even known she was missing. And yet the exact nature of what she understood was itself an expansive haze that would not condense into idea. She felt as if a word could explain it, but that word wasn't one she knew.

"Can't, or don't want to?"

"Can't." She shifted her weight to the other foot. Why was she even answering these questions anyway? "Anyway, I don't care how different I feel. That thing is horrible."

"Hmm, well," the thaumaturge said with a beaming smile. "I'm pretty horrible, you know." And she slipped inside her room, closing the door behind her.

Q'waderi just stared at the door, wondering how many types of horrible existed.


End file.
